Denver Hillbillies

Film: The Unsinkable Molly Brown
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Don’t tell me that I don’t make sacrifices for this blog. My Blu-ray player has evidently gone the way of the dodo, which meant that I wasn’t able to watch the movie I had planned today. Instead, I’m stuck pulling something off the DVR. Normally, on a night when I’m alone in the house, it would be a chance to watch something that my family can’t see—films like Blue is the Warmest Color or Last House on the Left come to mind. In this case, I decided on one that I’d be embarrassed to be caught watching by my family for a different reason: The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I put up with some shit for you folks. Please acknowledge that.

Now, I’m not going to get all “I hate musicals” on you here, although that’s certainly a direction I could go. The Unsinkable Molly Brown is clearly a most musical-y musical with everyone on screen playing for the back row. But no, there are other reasons for me to dislike this film that are absolutely more legitimate, although the absolute feast that everyone makes of the scenery at all times does rank pretty high. The Unsinkable Molly Brown features one of the most unpleasant title characters I’ve run across in a long time, at least in terms of characters that I’m supposed to actually like and root for. What press agents and the like would call “spunk” in this case is something I’m more apt to call a painful need for attention.

Same Story, New Tune

Film: High Society
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

Remakes exist in a weird area in films. Any remake needs to be judged on multiple criteria: those of the film itself and those of the original film. It’s impossible to do otherwise. As an example (and one as different as possible from today’s film), John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing can be judged as a science fiction/horror film and is also judged against its 1950s predecessor The Thing from Another World. It’s only natural. We have the question of whether or not it is a good film, and whether or not it stacks up against the original.

That’s precisely the situation we have with High Society, which is a pure remake of The Philadelphia Story with the recasting being more in the musical vein, an appearance by Louis Armstrong and his band as themselves, and a bunch of songs written by Cole Porter. So, the questions here are whether or not this stands up as a musical and how it compares with a classic film with such luminaries as Katherine Hepburn, Carey Grant, and Jimmy Stewart.